(Formerly) All Things Northanger Abbey

semenjolras:

i can’t remember the last time i had that much fun writing an essay

i mean yeah the goose essay was inadvertently hilarious

but just like

northanger abbey

the narrator literally tells you that her writing is being influenced by the conventions of the novel in her time.  she refers explicitly to parts of the book — chapters and such — and to the whole as “a work.”  she refers to Catherine, the protagonist, as “her heroine” and at another part is like “whoops can’t tell you about that though it would be bad writing practice.”  she has absolute power over the narrative and tells you about it, stops abruptly to address perceptions of novels to other novelists in the middle of her novel and also indicates that her main character likes novels in response to the way that novels are perceived in end-of-the-18th-century/beginning-of-the-19th-century England and then there’s this blurring in where the characters are speaking and furthermore Austen uses free indirect discourse which is already kind of a blurring of the distinction between narrator and character so the character’s thoughts will be included in the narration without it being explained necessarily to whom they belong so it’s almost like the narrator is in the head of the character and then increasingly the narration will break into spoken dialogue (ex: “Miss Tilney, she was sure, would never put her into such a chamber as he had described! - She was not at all afraid.” as opposed to I pronouns that would be used by the character in actual dialogue).  

and at the same time Catherine is living in the book’s reality but she’s living in the same time period as Austen is writing and she reads novels and expects them to parallel with actual life so she’s aware of all these tropes and expects things to fit them and adjusts her way of thinking to accommodate the schema she’s created where her life is a Gothic novel and she’s deeply dismayed and bothered when things don’t fit this worldview like modern décor in the old Abbey and so then she creates a “plot” and convinces herself it’s real because she’s in a Gothic-ish setting and there’s a character who fits her role of a villain and a vague story around which she can build up a horror story even though it’s not true so Catherine’s story is being structured around real-world constructions of fiction and she’s also structuring her worldview around real-world constructions of fiction

but then also you have the strange duplicity of a lot of the people she meets in Bath and will tell her one thing and then another that are completely contradictory and clearly not accurate (ex: a rickety carriage is about to fall apart promptly and is very dangerous but also it’s completely fine and the speaker would be happy to ride in it himself and even drive it and she has nothing to worry about) and then at the end of the novel Catherine herself is the subject of one of these dual-sided fictions so the characters are also building fictions around the fictional reality 

basically it’s fiction about fiction and the relationship between fiction (and literature) and reality and that’s really cool and i didn’t get to say as much as i wanted because it was so short but ugh i’m probably going to write a longer paper just on this because i think it’s really impossibly neat 

if you don’t think this shit is cool get out of my face

glamaphonic:

magpie’s nest: formerly-fyna: i absolutely adore catherine moreland just because she…

formerly-fyna:

i absolutely adore catherine moreland just because she exists, but i’d be lying if i didn’t say that i get an extra surge of love for her out of pure spite when people write about how they don’t like her because she’s ~whiny~ and ~stupid~. i mean, yeah she’s naive, but she also doesn’t need to be told how she feels (she knows she likes tilney; for a character who is so wrong about so many things she’s incredibly self aware). and she’s cute, damn it!

people keep on comparing her to lizzie bennet, who i love as well, as if lizzie is some perfect being who displays none of the flaws that catherine does. THIS IS SO WRONG. both ladies are deceived about the reality of their situations because of their imaginations. lizzie imagines darcy to be worse than he is because of the circumstances of their first meeting, and she imagines wickham to be better than he is because he compliments her and strokes her ego with his gossipy bad news about darcy. that’s what lizzie realizes when she says “did i know myself till now?” in the same way that part of the point of lizzie’s story is that she’s arrogant and judgmental to her own detriment, catherine gives herself over to fiction to her own detriment. they both read the world wrong: lizzie through her own prejudices and catherine through the lenses of novels. both are engaged with divesting themselves of fictions (catherine more tragically, in my opinion, because she gives up the passion with which she read novels, and gives up a large part of her imagination, and instead of learning to read novels properly she only learns to avoid them.)  (btw, catherine’s romance isn’t saved through the castigation of one of her family members, *cough*)

and if lizzie and catherine ever met they’d be friends. (charlotte would probably introduce them.)

also this whole lizzie vs catherine thing (am i imagining it?) plays into a lady vs lady thing, which is just gross. also stuff about how when i say i want a strong female heroine i don’t mean a heroine who is always right and runs around slitting people’s throats while screaming wildly across the plains a la xena (although i really reallylove ladies who run around slitting people’s throats, and xena warrior princess is a fav of mine) what i mean is a heroine who is a fully realized character and is allowed to have agency within the narrative and functions as more than just a vessel (i need a better word for this) for some other character

so yeah, catherine morland is awesome

it makes me sad but also does not surprise me at all that there are apparently human beings on this earth that somehow SOME WAY hate… catherine moreland?!?!?1?1?11

they both read the world wrong: lizzie through her own prejudices and catherine through the lenses of novels. 

Yes, thank you, this is a wonderful post and pitting Austen’s characters against each other is boring bullshit, but I would just like to add one thing about Catherine’s reading of the world that makes me love her a great deal.

Because yes, Catherine misinterprets and misunderstands a lot of the social cues around her through the frame of the gothic novel, but what’s really interesting is that she isn’t entirely wrong in her judgements.

She suspects General Tilney, with what is eventually revealed in the text to be good reason, because while he is not the kind of man who would murder his wife (well done, high bar), he is the kind of man who would suddenly throw a very young, vulnerable woman out of his home unaccompanied.

Catherine isn’t even given 24-hours notice that she will have to leave Northanger; there is not time to write for someone to meet and accompany her. She doesn’t even have any money, and only Eleanor’s intervention means she can pay for the expenses of travelling alone 70 miles by post-chaise to her home at Fullerton. General Tilney may not be a murderer, but he is not a good man, and Catherine’s suspicion of him is not entirely unjustified.

Likewise, Catherine’s discomfort with Thorpe, who twists social convention to force his unwelcome presence on her, and as the OP points out, her self-conscious admiration of Tilney; Catherine has fairly good instincts about people, which, yes, are distorted by her relationships with gothic texts [so much so that her relationship with Isabella is in part so positive because they read the same books- Catherine’s esteem for the novels transfers to esteem to Isabella].

So despite her misinterpretations, Catherine’s good instincts are there nonetheless and are generally borne out  by the text. Northanger Abbey is great because it’s not about ‘oh stupid girl shouldn’t read novels or form her own opinions’, it’s ‘young inexperienced girl gains the experience to be able to make and trust her own judgements when discerning between social lies, fiction and truth’. 

And this is a wonderful thing in Elizabeth Bennet’s story as well, in that while she certainly makes an error in judgement regarding Darcy and Wickham’s characters, she is also shown to be a perceptive and accurate judge of character in others (her analysis of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh comes to mind, and even of Mr. Bennet).

Elizabeth is brilliant and satiric and perceptive; prejudice distorts her good judgement, but like Catherine, the text never suggests that one error means that all of her judgements are invalid. It’s not an all or nothing equation.

Both Catherine and Elizabeth form misconceptions about others, but they are neither of them shown to be completely misguided and incorrect about the world - it’s not absolute. They make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, because they are strong well-written female characters, and making mistakes is kind of what human beings do.

(And Catherine would totally be in awe of and in love with Elizabeth and would read every book Elizabeth ever even vaguely alluded to and it would be charming and wonderful. Tilney would have to suffer through Collins while Elizabeth, Charlotte and Catherine talked, but he might enjoy it because it would give him marvellous opportunities to be ironic over Collins’ head.)

slattern:

delladilly:

slattern:

actually, moresleighbells’ post about further modern austen adaptations a la the LBD makes me want a northanger abbey adaptation! catherine would so be in to a vlog. and a tumblr. and a goodreads account (she’s totally devoured the twilight books) 

it could be so charming and cute!

OH MY GOD her midnight vlog posts from under the covers like in cahoots with the viewer I MUST CONFIDE IN YOU MY SUSPICIOUS THEORIES HENCE I AM GONE BEFORE THESE WICKED TRIPPING HOURS TO DAWN

#she never said that but she would #northanger abbey #MY SECOND FAVORITE AUSTEN NOVEL #now i am going to live in heightened desperate anticipation of a vlog thx tumblr user slattern

lolol go ahead and blame me because i blame myself too — i want it so bad now! i mean, can you imagine her enthusiasm and melodramatics? and general sweetness?  it would also be a really interesting change from the lizzie bennet diaries, since lizzie is a more cynical heroine. 

and i have to say, catherine would be so much fun to adapt into a modern, internet fandom setting! i mean, she’s basically a nerd. and she would be so excited by the things that happen around her, making them sound so much cooler and potentially thrilling than they actually are!

omg she would be SO EARNEST about EVERYTHING like ALL THE TIME, like wow literal feelings blog, she would overanalyze everything with overwide eyes and laugh a lot and vamp at the camera

maybe instead of costume theater she would do hand puppets

maybe instead of henry tilney she would fall in love with henrietta tilney like sly clever sweet patient adoring henrietta tilney who is just a little tall with a sharp face and sort of spiky dark hair 

can you imagine henrietta tilney

bcs i do

(Source: lady-stoneheart)

countessmary:

Re the screen cap I just reblogged:

No, it’s not [possible to read too many novels]! And much as I adore this adaptation, I wish it hadn’t gone down the tempting interpretation of swinging from one extreme to another in regards to novel reading. Catherine in the novel never burns Udolpho and there’s no sign that she’s going to stop reading after she marries Henry. (Can you imagine? Actually he’ll be reading Radcliffe out loud to her in bed doing all the voices and Catherine will be in heaven and being deliciously scared and sometimes his voice will shake because he’s trying not to laugh and she’ll know he is but will pretend not to notice.)

The moral of NA isn’t that you shouldn’t read novels, it’s to learn how to read them properly (if there is a “proper” way of reading). And in many ways Catherine learns important lessons from the novels, more than she learns from Henry who frequently tries to misrepresent her. (He insists she keeps a journal when she says she doesn’t, hopes that a love of flowers will get her outdoors when she needs no encouragement.) The greatest lesson Catherine learns in the novel is:

Catherine, at any rate, heard enough to feel, that in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.

It is from Gothic novels that Catherine learns the emotional truths of life - which I suppose was the point of the “different kinds of vampirism” comment in the film. It’s a vitally important message for young, female readers of novels in Austen’s days.

The established male critics of the day hated that women read these sensational novels - novels in which girls defied their parents, had adventures, married their lovers, and then lived happily ever after; novels which made literal the imprisonment and tyranny that was part of so many women’s lives by setting the stories in castles in Italy far removed from the polite drawing rooms of middle England. They thought that reading these novels gave women ideas. To counteract these sensational novels, there were many moral novels and what were called quixotic novels. These were about heroines who read too many novels, started to think their life was a novel, made terrible mistakes and eventually realised they were stupid to read these awful novels, give them up to settle down with a nice, dull man they overlooked in the first place. And patriarchy was appeased.

In allowing Catherine to keep her moral compass through the novel and to actually realise the real use of Gothic novels and learn from them is actually a subversive act on Austen’s part, dressed up in a standard quixotic novel. Catherine burningUdolpho and admitting that it is possible to read too many novels (a line not in the original text) is simplying NA into a much more simple quixotic novel.

And that seems an important distinction to me when fiction aimed at women is still being trashed (sci-fi? serious genre; romance? rubbish) and is said to be harmful to them.

Have we really moved on?

What we need is a Northanger Abbey for the Twilight generation. Not more book burning.

delladilly:

slattern:

actually,moresleighbells’ postabout further modern austen adaptations a la the LBD makes me want a northanger abbey adaptation! catherine would so be in to a vlog. and a tumblr. and a goodreads account (she’s totally devoured the twilight books) 

it could be so charming and cute!

OH MY GOD her midnight vlog posts from under the covers like in cahoots with the viewer I MUST CONFIDE IN YOU MY SUSPICIOUS THEORIES HENCE I AM GONE BEFORE THESE WICKED TRIPPING HOURS TO DAWN

#she never said that but she would#northanger abbey#MY SECOND FAVORITE AUSTEN NOVEL#now i am going to live in heightened desperate anticipation of a vlog thx tumblr user slattern

lolol go ahead and blame me because i blame myself too — i want it so bad now! i mean, can you imagine her enthusiasm and melodramatics? and general sweetness?  it would also be a really interesting change from the lizzie bennet diaries, since lizzie is a more cynical heroine. 

and i have to say, catherine would be so much fun to adapt into a modern, internet fandom setting! i mean, she’s basically a nerd. and she would be so excited by the things that happen around her, making them sound so much cooler and potentially thrilling than they actually are!

somebody make this happen

(Source: lady-stoneheart, via lady-stoneheart)